Obama's Emerging Legacy: Wars, Bankers and For-Profit Healthcare

"...72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan - something like Medicare for those under 65 - that would compete for customers with private insurers.... Sixty-four percent said they thought the federal government should guarantee coverage, a figure that has stayed steady all decade."

"In the end, Obama will throw his weight behind one or another pile of healthcare crap."

Only 20 percent of respondents oppose a Medicare-for-all-type plan. It would require the awesome power of a still very popular president to hold back a mob that is composed of damn near everybody, but Obama is up to the task. At the end of the process – this crap storm – that he has so skillfully set in motion, Obama will settle on a legislative contraption that will not even cover all of the 45 million-plus currently uninsured. For-profit healthcare will be safe for the remainder of his term, and possibly much, much longer.

Give Obama his props. He has turned the tide against real reform at a time of generalized crisis, when the chances for creating a civilized healthcare system were most propitious. He is a wonderment!

The Bankers' Man

Even a man of Obama's vast talents cannot easily hide the fact that the federal government (including the Federal Reserve) has "spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion...to stem the longest recession since the 1930s," as reported by the Bloomberg financial news service on March 31 [7]. The vast bulk of the money has gone to finance capitalists, most of it on President Obama's watch. It is easily the largest transfer of national treasure in planetary history, accomplished in the relative wink of an eye, mostly outside the legislative process. By comparison, the 2008 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States – that is, the value of every good and service produced by every man, woman, child and enterprise of any kind in the nation – was $14.2 trillion. By the end of March, the feds had "spent, lent or committed" a sum equal to 90 percent of last year's total economic activity in the United States – and still counting.

The Obama administration's façade is cracking on the macro economic issue. Despite his hollow protestations, it is now generally perceived that Obama's team is allowing "the banks" to get away with murder, theft and mayhem. In reality, the finance capitalist class is virtually inseparable from Obama's economic apparatus; one is an extension of the other. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Paul Volker and the rest of Obama's economic Rasputins will no more "rein in" finance capitalists, than they would put shackles on themselves.

"The Obama administration's façade is cracking on the macro economic issue."

Once gain, I must ask that you respect President Obama. Allow him to surround himself with people of like mind, men and women with whom he shares a core worldview. Do not belittle our president, by grumbling that he is being "manipulated" by "the bankers." Accept that he is a strong leader, who knows what he wants to accomplish and is wise enough to choose a team that reflects his vision. The Obama administration serves the bankers' interests because Obama wishes to do so.

This will be his undoing – not his expanding wars, not the healthcare fiasco – and much sooner than most think. Obama's sham banking regulations were unveiled to great fanfare – and bombed, colossally, on the front page of the New York Times. In language that an economics columnist for the "gray lady" of corporate media seldom deploys against sitting presidents, Joe Nocera wrote [8]:

"Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul.... Firms will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but once the financial crisis is over, it will, in all likelihood, be back to business as usual."

Nocera's headline read, "Only a Hint of Roosevelt in Financial Overhaul." William Greider, writing in The Nation, a bastion of "Progressives for Obama," concluded that [9] "most of Obama's reforms are insubstantial gestures, not actual remedies."

Kevin Baker's devastating piece in the July issue of Harper's stripped the emperor naked. Obama was not, as his progressive followers imagined, the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rather, he is the political soul-mate of FDR's predecessor, Herbert Hoover:

"Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past-without accepting the inevitable conflict....

"The common thread running through all of Obama's major proposals right now, is that they are labrynthian solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools - all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening tor Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own destruction."

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